Archive for the ‘2008’ Category

*According to the people who are responsible for marketing titles published and distributed by the University of Nebraska Press in Canada, Open Letter have opted out of Nebraska’s Canadian distribution agreement. I am in the process of confirming this with the publisher.

Back in Reykjavik after a vacation in London, Emil Halldorsson is waiting for a call from a beautiful girl, Greta, that he met on the plane ride home, and he’s just put on a pot of coffee when an unexpected visitor knocks on the door. Peeking through a window, Emil spies an erstwhile friend—Havard Knutsson, his one-time roommate and current resident of a Swedish mental institution—on his doorstep, and he panics, taking refuge under his bed and hoping the frightful nuisance will simply go away.

Havard won’t be so easily put off, however, and he breaks into Emil’s apartment and decides to wait for his return—Emil couldn’t have gone far; the pot of coffee is still warming on the stove. While Emil hides under his bed, increasingly unable to show himself with each passing moment, Havard discovers the booze, and he ends up hosting a bizarre party for Emil’s friends, and Greta.

An alternately dark and hilarious story of cowardice, comeuppance, and assumed identity, the breezy and straightforward style of The Pets belies its narrative depth, and disguises a complexity that grows with every page.

Four Major Plays
Henrik Ibsen
Oxford University Press
ISBN 978-0-19-953619-1
8 June 2008
$9.95 in Canada

A Doll’s House provoked uproar when it made its Scandinavian debut in 1879. In it, and its immediate successor, Ghosts, Ibsen brought to light attitudes that a self-righteous, hypocritical society would have preferred to leave unexamined; his heroines’ perceptions about society and their position in it are conveyed with a clarity that is still shockingly dramatic.

In Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder Ibsen shifted his focus from the pressures exerted on women by society to the pressures individuals exert on other individuals in their urge to dominate and control one another. Hedda Gabler, ‘a-crawl with the foulest passions of humanity’, as one contemporary reviewer claimed, is also a flawed idealist in an anguished private dilemma; in creating her Ibsen brought dramatic prose towards the expression of a reality beneath the surface of words.

This collection of plays is taken from the Oxford Ibsen, James McFarlane’s acclaimed scholarly edition.

Taking its title from Kurt Schwitter’s fanatical love poem ‘To Anna Blume,’ Beloved of My Twenty-seven Senses depicts a sensory realm so advanced that our six senses simply aren’t enough to truly perceive the world. At the age of 71, geologist Clemens Carlsen has set out into the Libyan Desert. His wife Anna has gone after him. No one knows where they are or why they’re there. A search party has been sent to look for them. In a hotel in a desert town in Egypt, their son Tore is waiting. As he sifts through his parents’ old journals, photographs, and scientific notes, their lives unfold before him; he discovers where they are and why.